Sharing or Plagiarism?

 In early September 1973 Ray visited me at my parents with Elaine. He still had his regular steady girlfriend Debbie, and was probably just trying to decide what to do with his new friend. She had brown hair, not quite shoulder length. Ray told me that Elaine knew David Bowie and as my parent’s house was two roads away from the house in Irvine Way where David Bowie took saxophone lessons, and with no reason for either Ray or Elaine to lie, I accepted this statement as true, and was a little in awe. Elaine asked me what I did. I told her that I had started to paint and write. I wanted to go to college to study art.

Cut-ups is a writing technique used by William Burroughs who was given the idea by Brion Gysin. According to Burroughs the basic idea is to take some writing, any writing and cut the page into four and then rearranges the writing to make new sense. There are variations on this theme, and variations on the use to which this exercise in experimental writing is put. It can be tailored to produce poetry, descriptive or even narrative prose, painting a picture in words, evoking a picture with every phrase to the susceptible. It has been claimed that the results can be prophetic in the same way as a crystal ball or Tarot cards, scrying with words for a glimpse into the future. Facts are reportedly gleaned from the rearrangement of random phrases tapping into the subconscious, like a Ouija board. On a more practical level William Burroughs used this technique to rework material he was not happy with. By using the cut-up technique a writer could rearrange writing at random joining fragments from different sentences to form a new narrative. In this way Burroughs would sometimes weave the words of other writers into his own, like a more sophisticated version of the parlour game consequences. 
I had read about the cut-ups in an underground newspaper but the method was not made clear in the article. I devised my own version and applied it to some poetry I had written. Elaine wants to know more and I produce the result of my labour on a food tray that I have hidden under my bed; a few drawings and some poems, some of which had been dissected line by line. Elaine asked me to explain further. I described the procedure. I had read about the cut-ups but did not understand Burroughs and Gysin’s description so I invented my own variation. I took a poem cut the poem into strips, line by line, and rearranged them at random. ‘It’s supposed to give a new meaning to what I’ve written,’ and mention Burroughs’ name so as not to take all the credit should the experiment work. But it was not an entirely successful demonstration, I read a few lines, a couple of sentences seem to interact but I felt embarrassed and as I was putting the tray back under the bed said that they might be alright as lyrics. Having shared my literary efforts, I half expected my guests to make their excuses and leave, but Elaine had more questions and I started to feel put on the spot. She asked what I intended to do next. I was surprised she was interested. I answered, ’I want to take some more drugs’. ‘I want to see another band,’ I told her that I had seen the Grateful Dead at Wembley. ‘Anything else?’ she enquired and so I said ‘commit suicide’, quickly adding that I was joking and did not even know anyone who had committed suicide, which at that time was true. I added that Ray did, but the look in his eyes indicated that Elaine was not going to be impressed by the story he had told me of the fellow from St Mary Cray who dressed in black, was into witchcraft, and had jumped to his death after listening to the first Velvet Undergound LP under the influence of LSD. 
Complaining that his fans were continually pestering him by calling at Haddon Hall in November 1973 David Bowie move out rented a flat in Maida Vale, then moved to a rented house in Chelsea. There were other reasons to leave the area; he had seen his best friend and his step brother sent to Cane Hill. In the same month a meeting was arranged for David Bowie and William Burroughs by Craig Copetas, who worked for Rolling Stone magazine. They met in London while Burroughs was still living at his Duke Street flat, near Piccadilly Circus. Bowie had apparently read next to nothing of Burroughs’ work but referred to a chapter of ’Nova Express’, called ‘Pay Color‘, a description of the future that describes ’People City’ and ’The Subliminal Kid’. After meeting William Burroughs, David Bowie started to read William Burroughs’ novel the Wild Boys, sometimes out loud to his inner circle of friends at his flat. He assimilated William Burroughs vision of the near future merging it that of Orwell’s 1984. Bowie’s was about to record his ’Diamond Dogs’ L.P. which starts with a description of ’Hunger City’ set in the near future. Though they did not discuss the cut-up technique in a transcript of their meeting published in Rolling Stone magazine, by spring David Bowie could be seen in the recording studio with his lyrics and a pair of scissors. He even posed with scissors for a publicity photograph.
By the early seventies Burroughs use of the cut-up style that had appeared dramatically over his sixties novels, The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, Nova Express, was beginning to run its course. Syd Barrett had recorded his ‘Word Song’ of apparently random free associated words. In the early seventies Captain Beefheart aka Don Van Vliet claimed to use a bag of words. Anytime that he needed a new word he would pull one out of the bag. In 1922 Tristan Tzara caused a riot at a Surrealist rally by creating a poem by pulling random words from a hat. David Bowie was able to introduce literary influences to popular music raising the intellect of his work for his mainly young audience. 
In 1974 Alan Yentob filmed David Bowie for a BBC documentary ’Cracked Actor’ during which he describes how he does his cut ups. 'I don't know how William Burroughs does his cut-ups, but this is how I do mine' Says David Bowie quite clearly. This is not as Burroughs described in his books The Job, The Soft Machine, Minutes to go, or The Third Mind. David Bowie is shown to apply the cut up technique to his lyrics for 'Sweet Thing'. David Bowie then goes on to demonstrate the procedure of cutting a poem or lyrics into strips, horizontally, line by line, the very same procedure that I had demonstrated to his friend in 1973.  I started to wonder if Elaine had passed on my version cut ups to David Bowie or whether he arrived at a similar conclusion. Though David Bowie has been accused of stealing ideas and has admitted this himself, how he arrived at the method is not important. Brion Gysin recognised the similarity between the results of cut ups and ‘automatic’ writing, directly from the subconscious bypassing conscious criticism and editing.. As a young man Gysin had been invited to exhibit with the surrealist but was expelled by Andre Breton at the last minute. Gysin thought that writing could evolve in the same way as the modern painting. Just as he had been inspired by the art of the mentally ill, Andre Breton was inspired by the automatic writing of Helene Smith, a French woman who claimed to be in touch with Martians who communicated through her. 19th century psychologist Pierre Janet encouraged psychiatric patients to write automatically. Schizophrenics when writing may start anywhere on the page, write for a while then continue somewhere else on the page. Schizophrenics may write down what their voices dictate. William Burroughs spent a month in psychiatric hospital, was diagnosed schizophrenic, and whether this diagnoses was accurate or not he maintained an interest in Schizophrenic art that is reflected in his own paintings. The work of mentally ill artists seldom follows trends but to this day contemporary artists are inspired by the art movements of the 20th century, not least the Surrealists the DaDa artists and the Expressionists, who in turn were inspired, in part, by the art of the mentally ill. It could be argued that the art of the mentally ill helped free the canvas for the contemporary artist. Sadly the mentally ill remain stigmatised by a society that conveniently prefers to believe the myths of mental illness rather than the reality. If the public were aware of the contribution that the mentally ill have made to the art world they might start to overcome their prejudices.

Ray and I had a common interest and that was music. Since 1972 we had tried recording on domestic tape recorders. We were aware of psychedelic music but I was aware of electronic music through my friend Norman. Norman’s father was a HI-Fi enthusiast, they built acoustic speakers from scratch, when his parents were out shopping or away for the weekend we listened to records on his father’s gramophone. Besides the psychedelic rock that was fashionable at the time, we listened, on Normans’s sister’s advice to anything that sounded strange, like Moroccan music or Terry Riley. Norman had a recording of Moroccan music that had a polystyrene ceiling tile as part of the cover. With Ray I would find unusual records from the library and record shops. One record I remember from this time was by John Cage and David Tudor. One side was a John Cage piano improvisation, the other was a recording of an audience as they entered the hall played back to the audience once they had taken their seats in the auditorium. Local libraries also stocked ’ethnic’ recordings of African tribal music, of the type by David Fanshawe or Jean Jenkins. I weren’t looking for ideas but I noticed that ideas would show up in our recordings that I had not deliberately put there. In other words I might think I have an original part of a tune and on playing back the recording recognize the same tune as something I had heard before. The tapes were little more than work tapes useful for vetting the recording. Trying to  edit out anything that was not original. If I heard something that did sound original I  might remember to play that next time. I borrowed ‘Composing with Tape Recorders’ by Terence Dwyer from Orpington library, and made tape loops around coffee jars with random pieces of improvised guitar music. I weighed the coffee jars down with anything I could find but the experiments, like the cut ups came to nothing. Still these basic editing exercises were useful. I could see that writing and music need not be limited by conventional editing techniques, and they were not expensive either. 

In April 1975 I had bought a practice amp from a shop called Wings that was at that time next to Bromley North station. The amp was a Triumph ’Leo’, probably the cheapest in the shop it was about two foot high and had two inputs and a vibrato effect which you could turn on and off and adjust the speed of the effect. It was valve amp designed for use with an electric guitar and if you turned it up it would distort and feedback. I also bought a Hohner pick-up for the ’Eko’ acoustic guitar that Steve sold me as he was buying a new guitar. 

I wasn’t very interested in being a virtuoso musician. I had no real aptitude for music and did not practice enough to eliminate mistakes and musical mistakes are noisy for neighbours who soon informed me of their displeasure. I know Beethoven moved seventeen times in one town because of complaining neighbours but he was an exceptional and dedicated musician and I am neither of these things. I thought, like others, that rock music was becoming to sophisticated and intellectual. This was not just sour grapes. Musicians seemed to be using their virtuosity as an exercise to show how clever they were, and they seemed not only happier than their audience but also often had a superior attitude which I found alienating. I thought about  Fauvist and Expressionist painters, how they seemed to simplify painting yet their work had an emotional content that more academic work lacked. (This was before the idea of expressionism was adopted by David Bowie, surely that really was coincidence.) In the way that expressionists seemed to use fewer brush strokes to describe their subjects, I thought musicians could use fewer notes. At the same time I realized that a lot of hard work went into learning an instrument and that not all these virtuosos were show offs, that some were obsessive, and in any case some people wanted to see a band enjoying their music, and in some cases expected a certain amount of arrogance from their rock stars. Steve said that he didn’t think I wanted to play well and he was, in a way, right. I did not want to play rock music that was challenging classical music in its complexity. The route has its merits but it was not for me. This was just before Punk Rock and people were looking for something new. Hippie music had become played out. With the end of the Vietnam War it had no cause. They were left with their virtuosity, but did not have anything to say. The music seemed to be inspired by cocaine and like most people did not crave and could not afford such a drug. Cocaine distanced the musicians who used it from the audience. Steve and I had tried to form a band as we had jammed together a few times. It was Ray’s idea, he was far a more accomplished musician than I would ever be and besides my main interest was in visual art. 

Ray made another friend. They met at registration. Mark was a fellow who was conspicuous for one reason , and that was when it came to sitting around smoking cannabis, as a few students did in those days, and it was his turn to put one together, he invariably would not put as much in his joints as anyone else. Thrifty as this was, it annoyed the other smokers, but despite their making comments like ’Did you remember to put any in this?’ he remained adamant and consequently the joints he rolled were passed around like  hot potatoes. To add insult to injury he would invariably have his girlfriend Emily in tow and though she wouldn’t ever roll a joint, she would happily smoke anything passed to her.  Emily liked to be called MT. Cannabis was not cheap it carried a considerable risk as the penalties for possession were higher and the attitude of the public was more hostile. So Mark’s action caused some resentment which expressed itself one afternoon soon after College had started. Ray, Stev and Sharon myself, Mark and his girlfriend went for a walk in Chislehurst woods. Pre-warned of Mark’s unsociable habit, but unable to believe until we take time to stop along the way, Steve is offended. Walking through the woods Steve and I become separated from the others and walk down the path towards Chislehurst Ponds and the Queens Head. I wondered if we should have a smoke while the others weren’t around but John laughed and said no. We would be as bad as Mark if we did that two wrongs don’t make a right. It was a bit of an Indian summer, a precursor to the notorious hot summer of the following year 1976. Steve gathered some of that wild grass with seeds like ears of corn and when we rejoin the others he throws them at Marks back while he is not looking. Children break off the tops of these plants and throw them at other children’s pullovers. Then Steve asks me to throw a couple of darts at Marks pullover.  Then when we stopped again Mark notices his pullover is covered with arrows and who gets the blame? Did you throw these? Mark accused me. I admitted that I threw one or two. There was no point in telling him that John had handed me a couple of darts urging me to join in so that he would not have to take all the blame. I didn’t say anything about Steve who had by now covered Mark’s wretched pullover with about thirty darts. Steve wanted me to take the blame so I did. I wasn’t going to grass. Mark had his culprit and starts having a go at me asking questions, to get me back for throwing arrows at him.

 Hoping that he would embarrass me and thinking he had a card to play he asked me about the band Ray and I were trying to start.‘ It’s a bit weird ‘I said, hoping to put him off. With the work that accompanied starting college I had forgotten about any band. ‘Well we know a band that’s really weird,’ replied Mark, cattily. I’d had this before with Ray, when he brought his friend of Bowie, so I knew when I was put on the spot he would leave me too it. I had to say something because this time I was also speaking on his behalf. ’Well we improvise,’ I continued, again hoping that this was enough for him to drop the subject. ‘What chords do you use?’ he asks ‘I don’t use any chords. Ray knows chords ’ I reply, and though this is fair enough for me after all I am playing solos over Ray’s rhythm guitar it is not a fair description of Ray’s playing. So I look to Ray hoping that he will join in and be supportive. But I am digging myself into a hole and he just smiles. I have read an interview with Fred Frith in the Melody Maker and I remember the phrase chord fragments. I quickly decide that a chord fragment is two or three notes played together that sound like a fragment of a chord, so I say’ we might use chord fragments,’ he does not question this but asks about ’vocals’, not words or songs or singing. I suggested screaming.  I had dug myself into a hole just because Steve had thrown a few grass darts at a skinflint so why drag everyone down in to it? 

   ‘We are interested in playing experimental instrumental music that goes on for a week night and day, a lot of the time it could be just drones.’  I continued. ‘like Indian music‘. We had been experimenting, and practicing for a few years. We had focused our ideas individually but did not talk about them. I was always finding odd L.P.s to play to Ray and Steve when they visited. Sometimes they would be amused sometimes angry, and if they liked the record would try and borrow it, sometimes succeeding. Though they would take an interest in the experimental sounds I was finding, Steve was not keen to join in. His folk style of playing depended on how confident he felt and he did not have time to improvise. Ray was keen to experiment with the limited resources we had, the two track tape recorder, the acoustic guitar with a pick-up, the twelve string guitar and anything else we could put to use.  I ended by saying that I left my guitar resting against my  amplifier  when I went to the shops, turned on and feeding back but Mark  turned away and started to talk to his girlfriend in the middle of the sentence, he seemed satisfied that he had embarrassed me enough. I had said enough to cover for Steve, and diffuse the situation.  The guitar feeding back left against the amplifier vibrated changing pitch, apparently playing themselves. Some noisy rock bands finish their ‘sets’ this way. If he had let me finish the sentence I would have added the last part of the formula, the part that would made some sense of what I had been sense but he was intent on showing me up convinced that I had covered his jersey with grass darts.
Mark wants to know about our band does he? The truth was that Ray and I had hardly discussed the matter, we had played together a few times. Ray was far more competent at conventional music, he had a great aptitude for learning chords, I didn’t like them. I thought we should invent our own music. I wasn’t that keen on western music. I had learnt scales but then I found out different parts of the world had different scales. I wanted us to invent our own scales and then make chords from them. Tony was never going to agree with this. I practised some melodic phrases which I would string together and play over Tony’s rhythm guitar.  Like many musicians I did not read music., though I had been given piano lessons for six months when I was twelve, practising scales and arpeggios for half an hour every evening. However it seemed best to reply to Mark  as he was so offended. 
                                                                                                         
Soon after we started the college course Tony became superior in attitude as I was no further use to him. He had used me and now had new friends. As we were only receiving a grant for tuition fees, we were staying in a student squat in South Croydon started by Martin Rawlinson. I never felt that I had fallen out with Mark, he was also a resident in the squat. Early in the term we all went to see Tangerine Dream at the Fairfield Halls. Mark was hired for the night to help move the synthesizers and other electronic equipment the band brought with them. Also helping was Chris Carter. I have reason to suspect Mark knew Chris Carter. We were impressed by the concert, when Tony asked me what I thought of the band I said that they sounded industrial. What do you mean asked Ray. Like the Ruhr Valley I replied.  
It was hard work drawing all day nine to four, often being told to sketch the corridors or listen to a lecture about obscure artists and their obscure or unaffordable techniques. ‘If you’ve got a thousand pounds to spare we can get you on a video course, that’s where the future lies’ we were told. Neither of us had the money

Martin Rawlinson was a student from Croydon College, Martin called himself the Martian Warlord. In the evenings Martin used to listen to the New York Dolls, with his entourage. He liked to stalk the streets in a long hair sheepskin fleece coat and a wolf mask and once was brought back by the police. Nowadays it is exceptional not to do these things, part of the syllabus but in those days the College was strict.  They had had trouble in the sixties, with Malcolm MacLaren and Jamie Reid.  While MacLaren managed the Sex Pistols Jamie Reid designed their artwork and one of the tutors reminded us of this one day when Ray and I were making a noise with a violin we had found lying around in a studio. Martin studied sculpture and had melted a radiogram and a television into strange landscape sculptures, which he called Martian sculptures. Eventually he would show these sculptures at Croydon library. Some of his drawings might be considered pornographic. His parents had him put in Warlingham Park before he became an art student. Perhaps he should have asked them before he melted their stereo and television, perhaps they should not have left him on his own while they went on holiday.

 I returned to the deserted Burnt Ash Hill Squat away from the drugs and the college. I thought I could travel by bus but I had no travel grant and was on No Fixed Abode counter payment. I carried on with my art work sketching the room at the top of the house. The house  had been deserted for some while, since the murder in fact. Usually such houses are vandalized by local kids but the house was strangely untouched, though to say that it had been lived in was an understatement. Years of use by hippies who had little regard for tidiness or housework had taken their toll, yet the house retained an eerie Marie Celeste atmosphere. It would only take a little exaggeration for local gossips to place the murder in the old squat. I put up with the old house for a while but could not endure the journey to Croydon. The old Victorian four story houses at 123/125 Burnt Ash Hill are pulled down  now replaced by modern flats.

Given the choice between attending the college more regularly or leaving, I chose to leave. The Head of The Department made a comment about my not being happy at the college but what was making it impossible to attend was the fact that I could find no accommodation nearby, because I could not afford the months’ rent deposit required by landlords. I should have asked to see the social secretary but it was clear that they wanted another scapegoat. They had already expelled a female Muslim student for drawing with traditional Muslim perspective. ’You’re here to learn western art,’ said the tutor for still life and life drawing but she insisted in sticking to her medieval technique. Medieval in as much as it did not observe the rules of the vanishing point. They wouldn’t get away with it today, and would now perhaps encourage her cultural difference, but they in the seventies the staff felt that they desperately needed to make examples, lest hippies and foreigners occupy the dining hall and hold another sit-in, or daub a Situationist slogan on the concrete walls again, , like Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid had in the sixties. 

I went back to my parents yet again but they had had enough as well and though I held out during the hot summer of 76, as I, started eating less and less, and became more withdrawn the psychotic depression set in and I started to believe things that were just not true. No-one would sell me drugs and I became too agoraphobic to visit anyone. People stopped visiting because when they did I would look at them as though they were a murderer, the vibe was in the air, but I did not know where it came from. I thought it was something I had said or done, I still had not been told about Mary, which was the real reason everyone went paranoid.

A year later, I had left the hospital, because Ray helped me find a flat in the house in St Pauls Cray where he was staying. Ray eventually confided in me about Mary. Mary was a girlfriend of Ray’s who had been murdered around the corner from the Burnt Ash Hill squat, by another of his admireres, called Sue. Of course I was shocked and it has taken longer than I care to admit to make sense of the situation. It would not have been fair to Ray to ask too many questions at the  as he was clearly still grieving, I merely inquired to where the murder took place. I thought that explained why the house at Burnt Ash Hill was deserted yet un-vandalized. 
To change the subject I asked him if anything had become of the band that Mark had told us about, the one that was really weird. ‘Oh they helped make the cover for ‘Animals’’, (the Pink Floyd LP), but as the subject seemed to bring him down even more I did not pursue it. 
Here I think that Ray may have been referring to Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson who not only worked for Hypgnosis, the company that designed the cover for Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ LP, but also played in ’really weird’ experimental band ’Throbbing Gristle. Chris Carter was also in Throbbing Gristle. During  1976 , between Art College and admission to the  Psychiatric Unit at Farnborough I had made the journey to London, to visit the record and book shops. At Compendium bookshop in Camden Town I bought two issues of Sandy Robertson’s punk rock fanzine ’White Stuff’. I was surprised to read an interview with Genesis P-Orridge, of the ’Industrial’ music band ’Throbbing Gristle’. In it he said that he too left his guitar leant up against his amplifier while he went to the shops’. At the time I put it down to mere coincidence. Later, in November 1977 I read an interview in ‘Sounds’ music paper where Throbbing gristle  claimed to have introduced the idea of no chords to music. There were other coincidences, they too were experimenting with weeklong drones, they described their music as industrial. Genesis P-Orridge, like David Bowie, had been compelled to meet with Burroughs in the early seventies.
Through the underground press, The International Times and Rolling Stone magazine, it was common knowledge that William Burroughs was living in Duke Street, near Picadilly Circus in London, where addicts and rent boys met and traded. Soon after I left home in 1972 I moved into a squat in Lee Green and met refugees from Notting Hill, and White Panthers from Greenwich and they were familiar with the work of William Burroughs. One hippy, an acid casualy named Pete, in a moment of clarity suggested I visited William Burroughs in the West End but a White Panther was quick to point out that Burroughs would probably not be interested in meeting me. This White Panther was a refugee from the Dilly, and had been involved with methedrine. I once mentioned Mick Farren’s name and this fellow snapped at me, what do you know about Mick Farren? If you meet Mick Farren ask him about Covent Garden and the methedrine mumbles. I had, before I left home been out with a teenager a few months older than me. I was surprised when she mentioned that her uncle knew Burroughs in Tangier, I know that people are skeptical about such claims but the surnames match and research on find your family website cross references. Of course being young and impressed by his broad minded and apparently sympathetic writing it did not occur to me that really William Burroughs was no different to the predatory older gay men that would proposition hippies in those days. In his writing Burroughs had no problem with requisitioning the work of others and incorporating into his own work by means of his experimental techniques such as the cut-ups.  Throbbing Gristle’s singer, Genesis P-Orridge, had introduced himself and visited to Burroughs in 1972. In 1980 Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle flew to America to collect a shoe box full of Burroughs cut-up tape experiments.  In Simon Ford’s book ‘Wreckers of Civilization’ artist and band member Cosi Fanni Tutti  (Christine Newby), is quoted as saying of Genesis P-Orridge, ‘He never exposed himself to real life, preferring instead that others bring it to him and then utilize their experience, ideas and information. It strikes me clearly that he conspired to invent himself via the talent and ideas of others’. David Bowie describes himself similarly in his interview with Cameron Crowe published in ‘Playboy’ magazine, in 1976.
        David Bowie, in Chris Welch’s book ’We could be Heroes’ is quoted as saying that, during the recording of his ’Young Americans’ L.P. in 1975, ’Every day 20 kids would be waiting outside and we’d let them into help out and give ideas‘.    
It would not surprise me if Mark had remembered and passed on my ideas, after all he was a student with the requisite skills. Patients in the community often have no end of ideas but have trouble putting them into practice. The so-called sane in society are more likely to have the resources to put ideas into action, but for them ideas are often thin on the ground. Though the patient in the community may be more in touch with their subconscious, it is often to such an extent that their actions are inhibited, either by the intrusion of the subconscious, the voices and other hallucinations, or by the effects of the medication taken in the hope of containing such intrusions.  
Of course this is all circumstantial, likely to be dismissed as a paranoid fantasy of a sad old failure. Because of this uncertainty most of this has been left out of the book. However recently, because after ten years silence David Bowie has made a new record and that there is an exhibition of his stage costumes and other memorabilia at the Victoria and Albert museum there has been a revival of interest in the Man who is arguably the most influential Rock singer. In a recent radio programme on Radio 4 called ‘I dressed Ziggy Stardust’, Shyama Perera describes how she sent a sketch to David Bowie and it eventually became one of his many stage costumes. The programme concluded by diplomatically saying, as it was so long ago in an era of drug use by David Bowie, and others, that memories could be unreliable and we could never say for sure.
The creative process is often more complex and involves more input than is evident in the finished work. A cut up is an editing technique with work ending up in the bin like film on the cutting room floor of a film editor. Ideas passed around in stoned conversations may be fair game. But there is a difference between someone making a mental note of an idea then passing it on in innocent enthusiasm and using it as social collateral with malice aforethought. Taking other writers work and blending it in with his own, Burroughs considered that he was avoiding the pitfall of ‘originality ‘ that was preventing him from writing more. Brion Gysin pointed out to William Burroughs that he was already using phrases that were not original. William Burroughs took this criticism as permission to requisition other writers work, and using the cut up technique turn it into new prose. The writer is rearranging the words he knows anyway, William Burroughs was doing what all writers do but consciously. The same process occurs in music, consciously and unconsciously. How many times have musicians complained that their music has been stolen? How many times have musicians doubted their own originality, thinking that they must have heard a tune somewhere else but cannot remember when? Big Jim Sullivan, a session musician who played on many records in the sixties once said that if he complained every time someone stole one of his ideas he would not have time to record at all.
David Bowie has often been accused of stealing ideas and admits this. Musicians such as Keith Christmas Pete Townsend and Mick Jagger have all accused David Bowie of stealing their music or ideas. Ian Dury accused Johnny Rotten of copying him. Again sometimes the musicians will not even remember, events are lost in the past and/or in a drugged haze. For a while Genesis P-Orridge claimed the phrase Industrial Music had been coined at a meeting of the band Throbbing Gristle by himself and artist and musician Monte Cazzaza. Mark Paytress credits Peter Christopherson with inventing the phrase. Even if this meeting predates my description of part of Tangerine Dream’s Croydon concert by a few weeks why wasn’t Peter Christopherson given credit? If Mark repeated what I had said I was hardly being original myself. On the cover of the l.p. ‘ No pussyfooting’ by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno there is a copy of a book called ‘Futurist Manifestos. A student friend of Normans had obtained a copy of this book. Norman showed the book to me. The book seemed too intellectual for me but I noticed that Marinetti used the word industrial when describing his artistic vision. In any case these ideas that were controversial in the days of DaDa and Futurism seem to have crossed over via literature to inform Rock and Pop music. With internet access artists and musicians no longer have to source ideas by meeting each other in person or from repeated conversations and library books. They no longer have to wait for friends to teach them skills that they can now acquire from the internet. Downloading is obliging many musicians to play live to make a living where before they might have been able to sell records that were not so easily copied. 

                                    

                                    Terry Burns

I first met Terry Burns at Cane Hill in February 1980. Terry had been pointed out to me by a nurse who was happy to identify Terry. I was warned that he could be aggressive and not to try and talk to him when he had been drinking.  I approached him after supper one evening, and asked him if he was David Bowie’s brother he said he was and after we exchanged a few words he wandered off. I did not speak to him for about a year when he was transferred to the same ward as me, Guy Ward, a long stay ward at the back of the hospital. 

Step brothers, David Bowie and Terry Burns shared the same mother, Peggy Jones. After presenting the classic symptoms of schizophrenia; the voices, the visions of heaven and hell, and the self neglect, Peggy’s sister Una was hospitalised. Terry would also suffer from these symptoms. Una was treated with ECT (electro-convulsive therapy), and insulin coma therapy. Then Terry’s Aunt Nora also fell prey to schizophrenia and was also subjected to psychiatric treatment. She was given a leucotomy after being admitted to psychiatric hospital during the war. 
Terry was brought up by his grandmother for a while the moved in with his mother and step father David Bowie’s father, John Jones. His step father bullied Terry while doting on his true son, the young David Bowie. Terry shared a room with the infant David for five years and the two became close, David idolised Terry despite his father. But John Jones would contradict everything Terry said. Terry was left to fend for himself when he was sixteen. Money was tight and John Jones would read out the cost of every item on the Sunday dinner plate even if it meant the dinner went cold,  and he refused to pay Terry’s keep even though he had a scholarship to Henry Thornton school in Clapham so Terry started work at 15.  Terry told me what he thought of John Jones, ‘I hated that man, it was the happiest day of my life when he died’.

Though the many biographies of David Bowie state that Terry was committed to Cane Hill hospital in 1972 and stayed their for the rest of his life he had in fact in the mid seventies been a care in the community patient living with his wife Olga, first in Beckenham, then in Penge.

Terry would drink and sometimes forget to take his medication, he also drank on medication. The drink made him aggressive and there was talk of domestic violence. Mario, a young traveller patient had made an obscene remark to Terry at the breakfast table on Blake ward. Terry was not amused and let Mario know this by punching him in the face. 
Terry had learnt boxing at Henry Thornton school and while he was on national service in the Navy in 1955-57, he had signed up for two years and served in Malta and Libya.
As Terry could not bring himself to repeat the jibe that provoked his violent reaction to Dr Smedburg, it appeared that Terry's actions were unprovoked. So he took the blame for the incident. and was transferred to Ruskin the male locked ward.
It also left the possibility that Terry was acting on instructions given by his voices, making him a danger to himself and the public. This inaccurate version of this incident was reported to Olga and other members of the family when they eventually came to visit Terry. 

Terry spent three months on Ruskin. There, Terry told me, he was assaulted by two of the staff,, one of whom kicked him in the eye. Though Terry never officially complained, allegations of this type were not unheard of. Cane Hill had been the subject of a police investigation into abuse in the mid seven ties. One of the patients told us that an article in the News of the World had alleged brutality in the hospital.

Doctor Smedburg decided that Terry must be incurable and that he would have to spend the rest of his life in the hospital as he was a danger to himself and others. Dr Smedburg then advised Terry’s his wife Olga to divorce him on mental health grounds. Dr Smedburg was aware that Terry had had a religious vision, and that he heard voices. Dr Smedberg was also a deaconess. So she had a conflict of interests. On one hand her religious beliefs regarded hearing the voice of God as a blessing. On the other hand hearing voices and seeing things are symptoms of schizophrenia. 

I met Terry again when he arrived on Guy ward, a long stay ward at the back of the hospital. He was visibly upset.' They're breaking up my marriage, what can I do? ‘I’m not even allowed to visit her. I’ll do myself in if I can’t be with my wife‘. I told him that if he did that they would have won, and this registered with Terry. I was not sure how seriously he was harbouring suicidal thoughts so I suggested he visit his wife anyway. ’I can’t they’ll get the police to bring me back and put me back on Ruskin. Olga had taken out a court order preventing Terry from visiting her. ‘Well you don’t have to accept what they say’, I replied. ‘What do you mean‘?’ asked Terry and then I could see the problem with Terry, for there was just a hint of menace in his voice replacing despair a habit some drinkers have. It meant if you don’t come up with an acceptable answer there could be trouble.. Terry told me his wife had taken out a court order to prevent him from visiting  her. I said ‘Well, just because they say your marriage is over doesn’t mean it is’, Terry  accepted this because it gave him hope and calmed down.
Though Terry was, by this time, in his forties, and had to some extent been worn down by psychiatric treatment it was obvious that he had been and still was a handsome man. His dark hair was speckled grey and this added to his air of menace. Terry's eyes were cornflower blue. He still had his own teeth, and in rivalry said his brother as he called David Bowie, had two dog teeth that ruined his looks. He said this with little malice though. He was too good natured and kind for spiteful talk, anyone who knew him will tell you the same. His nose was similarly shaped to his step brothers. His skin was a bit sallow, but clear. 

Terry soon found an audience in the few patients on the ward capable of holding a conversation. We were relieved to find that Terry was not a violent bully. Terry described his religious vision, how the ground had opened up before him and a fiery pit appeared before him, and how out of this fiery pit the devil had risen out of the flames in front of him. I asked Terry if the Devil had said anything. 'Isn't it bad enough just seeing the devil, without him saying anything? Terry replied. We listened in wonder when he told us this and Malcolm, who often reminded us of his Catholic faith asked Terry if he too was a Catholic but was disappointed when Terry told him that he was not. Later, while still in the dormitory Terry told me that he had heard the voice of God who told him he had chosen him for a mission, but  didn't tell him what that mission was.
There are other different accounts of Terry’s religious visions. One is in the Gillmans biograophy, probably from his Aunt Pat. David Bowie describes Terry’s visions in two interviews.

I soon found out that Terry did not want me to ask him questions about David Bowie. When I mentioned that David Bowie had written songs about him, (‘All the Madmen’ and ‘The Bewlay Brothers’) instead of responding he stared into space. Then he said 'My favourite song of my brothers is 'The Prettiest Star'. But he would occasionally volunteer information; 'My brother asked Barry Vines (the Cane Hill entertainments officer) if he could put on a concert for the patients, in the main hall. Barry Vines said 'we’ll try and fit you in' David was choked,' Terry told me. 'We'll try and fit you in' Terry laughed as he repeated the phrase then added 'This was just as my brother was becoming famous'. 
Another time that Terry was amused was when he read in a Sunday paper that that David Bowie had been seen in the company of Oona Chapman, Charlie Chaplin's wife. 'I see he's going out with older women now' was Terry's comment but he only said this out of resentment. The significance was apparently lost on Terry. Charlie Chaplin's mother Hannah Chaplin had been an inmate at Cane Hill at the end of the nineteenth century. Hannah Chaplin had been a music hall singer who had fallen on hard times. She had a spell in the poorhouse before being admitted to Cane Hill where she was subjected to water treatment, whereby the patient is plunged into a cold bath in the hope of a cure.

Though he settled into the Guy ward routine, Terry would occasionally rant against his situation. These rants were not alcohol inspired though every morning he took the tablets that were prescribed. On Guy ward Terry was prescribed Haliperidol an anti-psychotic drug. he was on at least 5mg haliperidol, the equivalent of over 100 mg of chlorpromazine

 The drugs did not stop his voices and he would occasionally laugh out loud or repeat what they said. He would pace up and down the ward saying 'this is hell, boys, this is hell' another thing he would say again and again was 'I don't understand why nobody visits me,' and 'I don't know why my family doesn't visit me'. Then, unaware that he was answering his own question he would say' If my brother walked in right now, I'd punch him in the face'. 
When he heard David Bowie's then new single 'Ashes to Ashes' he said, 'have you heard my brothers new record ' ‘Major Tom's a junky’, he sings'. Terry was concerned that a song should refer to drugs in what he thought was an arbitrary manner. Terry told me himself that he did not take street drugs though he admitted to taking the occasional Noctec capsule from his wife’s prescription bottle. Noctec is a brand name for chloral hydrate capsules.  

Soon after that as if to make up for criticising his step brother, Terry told me. ’I don't know why my brother uses all these gimmicks on his records, he has a very good voice, he could sing as well as Frank Sinatra if he wanted to’. Later I bought a copy of 'Scary Monsters' the cassette version, and as I had a portable cassette player, I asked Terry if he wanted to listen to it. 'No’ he replied adding ‘your alright', he said not to offend. I did not know there was a time when Terry followed his step brother’s career so avidly as to phone the record company concerned to send him a copy of any new record David Bowie made, and be sent a copy. Those days were gone. Terry was angry at his brother

'I don't know why he leaves me to rot in this mental hospital, I bought him his first saxophone, I got him started,' Terry told me, though David Bowie has said in an interview that his father bought him his first saxophone, even stating the length of the hire purchase agreement, two years, John Jones keeping up the weekly payments. 

 One day Terry crossed the dormitory just to tell me, out of the blue, that 'there was no wicked uncle on the Yorkshire moors'. Though Terry had not lived the Rock n' Roll life style enjoyed by David Bowie he did say that he had met Lou Reed, who he described as an ordinary bloke who liked a drink'. Then he added 'my brother kicked him out of the house for drinking, but I liked him‘. 

Terry liked a drink himself and  on giro day, he went to the Red Lion pub in the town. After giro day Terry would wake up the next day with a good deal of his money gone and a few cigarettes left in his packet of Rothmans. 
Terry would wander down to the corridors  and make his way to the hospital shop. On the way he would ask anyone he met for money. He would give them the same hard luck story about how he was skint and how his millionaire brother would not visit him or send him any money. 
He would tell his hard luck story to whoever he had decided might give him the price of a beer or at least a cigarette even if they were a total stranger. Money was a source of grief for Terry. When his mother sent him a birthday card containing just two pound notes and a message that read 'I'm sorry that I cannot send more this is all I can afford'. Terry read the card aloud to me then tore up the card and threw it out the corridor window. 'You'd think with all the money my brothers making she would be able to send more than two quid'. The incident became collateral as Terry used it to embellish his prelude to another touch.  

Once at the hospital shop he would from a porter or a friend to turn up so that he could ‘borrow’ a pound to buy special brew. Terry insisted on drinking on medication and would buy beer as soon as he had some money, and on a daily basis. ’I like to have at least one beer a day, ‘it’s a point of pride’ he told me. 
I doubt if Terry would have become violent if he had not had to endure the constant psychological bullying from his step father. Though he drank socially after work when he and Bill Burkes went to the West End and Soho after work, Terry drank because he was lonely. I saw him when he had been drinking in hospital and for a while, when he was on the admission ward, the nurse was right, it was best to keep out of his way. But on Guy ward, where he had friends, he would return to the ward quite peacefully, lie down on his bed and sleep it off without intimidating anyone in the slightest 

Terry was one of the few customers allowed credit, from the hospital shop usually this took the form of the loan of a packet of twenty cigarettes, which he always repaid.
Terry was not just a scrounger sometimes while he waited he would sing in the hospital shop and corridors, fragments of songs, ‘Standing in the Shadows of Love‘, ‘Something’s got a Hold of my Heart’ were two favourites of his. Being a bit older than his step-brother he liked singers such as Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra and Gene Pitney. He liked tuneful pop, the Four Tops and Paul McCartney. 

At lunch time Pat behind the counter, who ran the hospital shop, would give Terry a packet of cigarettes to share among the patients who were to ill or old to work. 
Terry had strong working class left wing views. He had been a member of the union when he worked as a clerk for Amalgamated Print in Holborn when he was a young man.

 Terry told me how he had once rallied the patients in the hospital shop during one lunch break. He had the patients promise not to return to the grim workplace at two o'clock when the lunch break was over, The patients agreed but come the hour they all marched back to the single story building where top pay was £4 a week for a twenty five hour week. 

In his song ‘All the Young Dudes’ David Bowie sings’ My brothers back at home with his Beatles and his Stones but we never got it off on that revolution stuff, too many snags, what a drag’.
David Bowie had stopped visiting in the early seventies coinciding with his success as Ziggy Stardust. 
But when David Bowie started to become very famous and successful the visits stopped. For a while in the early seventies he did visit Terry with his wife Angela. It is said that they brought a hamper and held a picnic for him every month but for how long is unclear. It has also been said that they stopped visiting because when they did visit Terry would just sit silently on the lawn, psychotic and mute.  

Terry's anti gay beliefs ran so strong that after our first conversation when he was new to the ward, before he would talk to me any further, I not only did I have to swear to him I was not gay, but also I was made to promise that I never would be in the future. It was obvious however that Terry's homophobia was at odds with David Bowie's attitude. If he was to get any help from his step-brother, who was most likely of all his relatives to have the means to help, Terry was going to have to drop his aggressive homophobic attitude. 

Something had to be done about Terry’s attitude if he was to get any help from his step brother.
I had a copy of a book about Andy Warhol by Pat Hackett.  I showed him the Peter Beard portrait of Candy Darling facing page 153. 'What do you think of her?’ I asked as if showing a pin up. 'She's quite nice' said Terry.' Well she's a bloke' I said. I wasn't trying to catch Terry out in some barrack room prank. I was saying if you’re going to get your brother to help you your going to have to be more tolerant. Instead of reacting angrily Terry became thoughtful. 

I did not know it at the time but when he was 16 left behind in a flat in Brixton when his family moved to Bromley. Here the landlord made a homosexual advance to Terry who was by all accounts an attractive young man. Terry resonded by punching the landlord and this set a pattern that Terry found hard to control throughout his life, because when he told his family it seems that thay were sympathetic, and that his actions met with approval.
I now know that his homophobia was not so much to do with the image his step-brother projected but because when he first left home his landlord tried it on causing the young Terry to punch the fellow. It may well have been the root incident that left Terry with the unfortunate habit of occasionally lashing out.  

By chance a young barber had started working in the hospital. We all needed a haircut and when I mentioned to the barber that David Bowie’s brother was in the hospital he had his assistant lock the door. ’I want to know more about this,’ said the hairdresser in his camp accent. I told him that Terry was a bit of a rough diamond and warned him about his attitude toward gay men. I know that not all men with a camp accent are gay but I thought it best to warn the barber about Terry’s attitude. ‘Don’t worry about that, just get him here’ said the barber. After cutting my hair he let me go. Back on the ward Terry asked me where I had got my hair cut, so I mentioned the new barber. The barber liked to talk to the patients and Terry enjoyed talking to anyone who could hold a sane conversation in the hospital. Terry started to go to the barbers quite often. Malcolm noticed this and said that he was' Worried that Terry was turning the other way, he's visiting that barber rather a lot'. With the lack of subtlety that patients sometimes employ David Griffiths asked if he thought Terry had ’turned queer’. ‘I couldn’t care less, all I worry about is people talking to plainclothes,’ Malcolm replied. His visits to the barber were probably the nearest to counselling that Terry would see on Guy ward, Dr Smedburg wasn’t going to back down and the staff weren’t going to contradict her. I believe It was the new hospital hairdresser who helped Terry overcome his prejudice. Though David Bowie’s image has become more and more heterosexual over the years, in the early 1980’s David Bowie was still a hero to the gay community. 

Terry was reassessing his situation, and seemed to see his step brother in a different light. Terry made the effort accept David Bowie’s bi-sexuality. 
 
He received visits from his Aunt Pat in the dormitory, 
His wife visited him and then his mother
When Peggy Jones visited Cane Hill to see her eldest son they sat round the table by the door by the corridor in the day room downstairs. 
Terry introduced me to his mother, They were near the kitchen just the other side of the door was the kitchen serving  hatch, but after offering her a cup of tea which she declined I made my excuses not wanting to impose. Terry had so few visits from his family when he was in hospital and I have seen too many patients ruin other patients’ family visits out of jealousy to do the same. 
She appeared normal and conventional in appearance though but then so did Terry. Terry had adjusted well to his illness more than the doctors gave him credit for. Well enough to hold a normal conversation without the affectations and bizarre ideas associated with schizophrenia. 

Terry's hopes must have been raised when his Aunt Pat and Uncle Tony invited him to dinner. They turned up to take Terry to their home and Jack had them wait in the day room which was almost empty except for the few old men patients who were permanently installed in front of the television. However on this particular evening the television was turned off by Jack who was a little in awe as Aunt Pat is also David Bowie's aunt. Jack pointed them out to me from the other side of the day room. They were well dressed and conventional. Aunt Pat wore a dress Uncle Tony wore a brown suit, both would not have looked out of place had it been the sixties or fifties. They looked middle class not poor or ostentatiously rich. They looked anonymous, but dignified and reserved, and nervous of the hospital surroundings.

Terry seemed to be building bridges and there was little sign of the aggressive Terry.
But the very fact Terry had shown that he was able to listen to reason and change his attitude was not taken well by Jack the nurse.  

In fact he was hoping that Terry would frighten some of the shirkers out of the dormitory
 From the other side of the day room in alcove by a side door, where we can slip out of their view, stealing the odd glimpse Jack says ’Terry’s been a great disappointment to me, I was hoping he’d sort out those skivers up there, Griffiths and Malcolm, and that David  Surefoot doesn’t do anything either. I don’t know what’s got into Terry he was supposed to frighten some sense into that lot.’ After a pause he continued, looking toward Terry‘s relatives. ’Maybe this lot will be able to help me get rid of him’, ’What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Well they could take him off my hands he’s no use to me.’ ’You mean Terry could go and live with them?’ ’We don’t know yet, they might have him, it depends on how this visit goes.’   

The next day Jack told me 'That Terry Burns is in trouble now’, he’s blown it, he hit his uncle last night,' he told me, partly vindicated by the fact that Terry has at last committed a violent act. 

Terry told me about his visit, 'He (his uncle Tony) asked me if I wanted a drink, I thought he meant a proper drink, you know a few beers or something. Then he poured me a sherry in one of those little glasses, I was insulted. I punched him'. In the Gillman’s account of the incident Terry is said to have punched his uncle because he had said that Terry expected too much from him and his aunt Pat. Perhaps he said this while pouring the sherry. I was in a hurry I had told the staff in industrial therapy that I was going to the hospital shop not to the other side of the hospital back to the ward. It occurred to me that Terry was afraid that he may be sent back to Ruskin for another kicking so I told him that they can’t really do anything because the incident did not happen on the premises, and as long as his uncle doesn't press charges he'll be alright. His uncle did not press charges but the reputation Terry has tried so hard to repair is again in tatters. He has unwittingly distanced himself from his mother and his step brother. He was not sent to Ruskin but at meeting on the ward attended by Terry, Dr Smedberg, and Jack the nurse, Terry agreed to take a part time job in the stores behind the hospital shop, fetching and carrying for the woman who runs the shop who is also called Pat.' He's got away with it', Jack tells me, but really Terry is condemned to spend the rest of his life at Cane Hill. However another account has Tony accusing Terry of expecting too much him and his wife Pat. Summoning up his courage and presenting Terry with a sherry to soften the blow, Tony may have been referring to Terry's general expectations from their branch of the family. Terry, deprived of the luxuries most take for granted thought Tony was referring to the drink just handed to him. Still Jack was not happy and thought that Terry should have been sent back to Ruskin. Terry kept up his routine of begging, drinking and then returning to the ward to sleep off the effects of drinking on medication. 

Soon after the incident with his uncle Terry was given the job of store man for the hospital shop, helping unload and fill the storeroom. The job changed his routine; he did not go down to the town until after 2pm when he closed the shutters for Pat. The difference between the life he had and the life he could have had if there hadn't of been a stupid misunderstanding between him and his uncle must have preyed on his mind. There is no doubt that the incident with his uncle Tony demoralised Terry. On hearing that his mother was reunited with David Bowie, he must have felt that he too would be in with a chance of hearing from his brother, but though Tony refused to visit Terry again. His aunt Pat did visit, and eventually wrote many letters to David Bowie asking him to help Terry but only received a couple of non-committal replies. 

On June 2nd 1982 Terry jumped from a second storey window. I have heard that Terry was driven to jump from the dormitory window by David Griffiths’ endless ranting. A student nurse who worked with Terry at the time told me that Terry jumped because he had no-one to have a normal conversation with. According to Pete and Leni Gillman, Terry made it clear his ‘apparent suicide attempt’ was ‘primarily directed at Olga’, his wife. Terry had told me that it was the break up of his marriage that had triggered his suicidal thoughts. He was upset that Dr Smedburg had advised Olga to end the marriage. All these reasons may have contributed to the suicidal act that day, 

From the moment he was born events conspired against Terry. Rejected by society for being illegitimate, passed to his grandmother and back again, left behind on his own when his family moved to Bromley. When he was accepted back into the family home he had to endure psychological bullying from his step father. Rejected when he returned from National service Terry was then passed from pillar to post by his family. 
David Bowie’s visit
In the previous month, at the Cannes Film Festival, David Bowie, in an interview, told writer Hillary Bonner that he felt guilty about not seeing Terry. The Sun Newspaper reported Terry’s suicide attempt.  Two weeks later David Bowie visited Terry at Mayday Hospital in Croydon. By all accounts the visit went well. Terry did not become hostile as he had said he would if he saw his brother again, in fact it is said that the two reminisced for an hour over their childhood which they spent together. David Bowie brought Terry some cassettes and a cassette player some books and some clothes. David Bowie was heard by a nurse to promise to help Terry and the phrase 'what’s mine is yours' was quoted. Not surprisingly Terry returned to Cane Hill full of hope but the very fact that he was returning to Cane Hill and not some more pleasant private nursing home may have cast doubts. But when The Sun reported Terry’s visit claiming that David Bowie feared for his own sanity, 

At Cane Hill Aunt Pat started to visit Terry again every month, bringing him the minor luxuries that patients are expected to do without. In 1984 Terry met a female patient who becomes his girlfriend. Terry became re-enchanted with his brother enough to praise his music when he hears it on the radio or the television. His who girlfriend who told the Gillmans that she wished to be known as Janet, says that she and Terry listened to Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra records in the hospital. 

When Janet started seeing Terry, she was told by staff that Terry can be violent. She also found this not to be the case in fact she was struck by his kindness and the way he cared about the other patients. She noticed the camaraderie that existed between the inmates, but although she and Terry enjoyed each others company Janet was not a long term patient, when she was discharged in the autumn of 1984 she returned to the outside world leaving Terry behind. Though Janet wrote to Terry and sent him money Terry seems to have seen this as yet another rejection. 

While he was seeing Janet he took pride in his appearance. Though he continued to receive visits from his aunt Pat, after breaking up with Janet he stopped looking after himself and fell into self neglect. 
Stephen Burrow, then a nurse at Cane Hill, confirms Terry’s decline in a thinly disguised description in his autobiography. He describes meeting Terry in the hospital shop. They discussed Arthur Miller’s ’Death of a salesman’ and Stephen Burrow was surprised at how well Terry could remember the book. 

Again Terry said that he cannot concentrate to read but added that he did not know whether his inability was caused by the medication or his illness. 
Now that Terry had attempted suicide he knew that he was unlikely to leave the hospital. When Terry survived his fall he was left with a limp a withered arm and constant pain. He had been put on antidepressants besides antipsychotics. Nurse Stephen Burrow describes Terry’s body and tongue writhing, symptoms of tardive dyskenesia, the effects of long term use of antipsychotics. Terry’s teeth were neglected, he now had a paunch and he had the black stains of a heavy smoker on his hand. He had none of these problems when I knew him. In the space of two years he has become one of the old boys that he sympathised with. Stephen Burrow noticed that Terry still has compassion for the other patients. Terry told him that he can see how it might be difficult for his step-brother to visit him. Terry was still roaming the corridors, still socialising with the other patients, and still articulate enough to talk about the literature he loved and passed on to his step brother, though he still felt that he was too ill to read anymore.

Terry's mother Peggy visited again but she told Terry that it was up to David Bowie to help him. But Terry's letters to David Bowie went unanswered. Pat phoned Peggy but they fell out over Terry's plight, never to speak again.

'I can't spend another year here'. Terry told his Aunt less than two weeks before that Christmas. Though Terry had started to doubt that David Bowie would help him it was Olga who was on his mind. When Pat visited on the 15th of December the only visit he received that Christmas Terry had dressed smartly and said that he intended to visit his ex-wife. Terry did not want to face 1985 in Cane Hill. Pat could see he needed help but there was nothing she could do but leave him there. Terry did not visit Olga but spent Christmas again at Cane Hill. It a dreadful feeling when your own family wont have you home for Christmas but in the hospital this was the rule not the exception. The mentally ill have to endure prejudice and ignorance, even from their relatives. 

On the 27th of December 1984 Terry made his way down the hill to Coulsdon South station. Terry lay his neck on the track but at the last moment as the train approached he rolled away, leaving him unharmed but dazed. Then Terry started to take handfuls of sleeping tablets, crunching them in his mouth so that he could swallow them quickly as he could see that he had been noticed by three railway workers. When they reached Terry they attempted to save him by holding him upside down to prevent him swallowing the tablets, but they were too late. Terry lost consciousness so they and phoned for medical assistance. He was taken to Mayday hospital and pumped out. 
 When Terry regained consciousness there was a struggle when he demanded to leave claiming that he was going to see his mother, where, he insisted, his brother would be waiting for him, but in fact his brother and mother were celebrating Christmas in Switzerland with Iggy Pop. Not convinced, the doctor at Mayday Hospital called the social workers and Terry was kept in overnight. The following morning Terry was sent back to Cane Hill. He was put on the locked ward where he spent five days laying on his bed before he was transferred to Guy ward where David Griffiths was still ranting.
His step-brothers birthday, 7th January, came and went. Nine days later Terry's suicidal thoughts led him to another attempt. 

The nursing staff at Cane Hill hospital have been accused of a lack of vigilance, for allowing Terry out on the 18th January but some of the staff that had to travel to the hospital were delayed or stopped by the snow, but in any case the doctor would have only allowed Terry to the long stay ward if he had considered him not at risk. It was easy enough to leave the hospital unnoticed by one of the three entrances. 

I dont know if Terry took a drink that morning, it is likely he was a creature of habit and once told me that it was a point of pride that he took a drink everyday.
Terry ended up at Coulsdon South station at about mid-day. He went to the platform this side of the tracks through the barrier, not using the side entrance by the ticket office. He went to the end of the platform and when he saw Littlehampton to London express train approaching at 70mph he calmly climbed down off the platform looked at the train, turned away lay his head on the track in full view of the train driver who braked but could not stop the train at that speed until all eight carriages had run over Terry's body. A woman on the platform screamed, the train stopped in the eerie quiet that the snow brings when people are reluctant to leave their homes because of the cold.

Everybody who knew Terry felt regret and remorse. At the funeral as his mother and Aunt Pat had already fallen out they sat on opposite sides of the church. A few patients and staff from Cane Hill brought the number of mourners to 11. 
Aunt Pat went to the papers with allegations of neglect against David Bowie. David Bowie did not attend the funeral but sent flowers 
On the long stay wards it was unusual for patients to receive any visitors let alone the few that Terry received. Relatives don’t want tp know, and some past transgression is usually cited as an excuse not to visit. This could be as trivial as one family member wanting to talk to another late at night. The Victorian ‘Book of Lunacy’ had literally thousands of reasons to commit a patient to the asylum, most of them extremely arbitary. David Bowie has complained in interviews that he was unhappy with the contract he signed with Tony De Freis, Tony De Fries claims David Bowie led an extravagant life style. In turn David Bowie toured extensively. While Terry was calming down on Guy Ward, and coming to terms with his brothers sexuality, David Bowie’s contract with RCA coming up for review. His ‘Scary Monsters’ marked the end of his obligation. The he waited for his contract with Defries to expire befor signing a contract with EMI for 17 million. Terry had jumped out of the window at Cane Hill on June 2nd 1982, had promised to help Terry but, he started to record in January 1983. Then as the 17 million is an advance that has to be earned, David Bowie had to tour to promote the record and to earn more money from the concerts. For David Bowie this was the deal he had been working towards since the early sixties, perhaps childhood when he was informed and encouraged by Terry. Nothing at that point, even by his own admission some artistic integrity, was going to stop him. When he was confident of fulfilling the contract he may have meant to put time aside to help Terry, but families often put off helping until it is too late, and anyone who remembers the old long stay wards in the asylum will know this. 
But what could David Bowie have done. Terry had friends in the hospital and though conditions were frankly abysmal, a private nursing home may have caused more disruption than it was worth, with staff trying to exploit Terry’s bond with David Bowie. At Cane Hill everyone knew Terry had no support from his family so they did not bother him in that way. There was camaraderie in the old hospitals that money could not buy. In fact David and Terry’s cousin Kristina said the same thing after Terry died, you could not just expect to help Terry by pouring money in. But what Terry’s family seem not to have known that the hospital was suffering from a lack of funding which had resulted in a lack of staff. On Guy ward there was one nurse on duty during the day, and when not making the beds or supervising mealtimes, he was usually in the office doing paperwork. At night there was one nurse to cover for three wards, so there was no-one to stop Terry from drinking on medication. Even worse, as Terry did not think that the tablets were having any effect on him he was unaware of the dangers of drinking on medication. 

Terry had been an important formative influence on David Bowie giving him books and records at a time when there was no easy access to information via the internet. David Bowie acknowledges this in interviews.

Some quotes by David Bowie concerning his step brother Terry Burns.
Interviewed by Courtney Pine;
‘My brother introduced me to jazz really. I remember the first two albums that were big favorites of his and he passed them on to me. One was by the MJQ and the album was ‘Fontessa’ which was an Atlantic album, I think it was their first one for Atlantic and the second one was by a band that really, pretty much unknown the George Redman Group, they were part of the West Coast cool jazz. . . . .do do do do (sings tune) . . . was a track called ’Babette’ on that album, it was called ’Moods in Jazz’ and the baritone player was Bob Gordon who was pretty well known at the time. Actually you can still get that album now because I lost my copy, I had to get it again, there’s a label called V.S.O.P.’
From George Tremlett’s biography ‘On the Brink’;
‘Yes it was Terry who started everything for me. Terry was into all the Beat writers, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlingetti, William Burroughs and John Clellon Holmes, and he’d come back home to Bromley with the latest paperbacks tucked in his pocket.’
From a broadcast interviews;
‘It’s been really well recorded that my family is pretty rampantly, what’s the word, I think I’m not so sure how much of it is madness. I think there’s an awful lot of spiritual mutilation goes on in my family.’
‘ I guess that the dark cloud over that side of the family is there was an awful lot of mental instability among all of them and tragically two or three of her siblings committed suicide. It seemed to be something that I would hear constantly in my life growing up how so-and-so has left us now. I guess most of us have battled with reality and something else all of our lives.’
‘When I was a teenager I took him (Terry) to see Cream. It had really moved him and he’d never really seen rock bands before, that wasn’t really his life. And I remember we were walking home and it was though he was having a vision and he saw the roads opening up and fire in the cracks in the roads and he went down on to his all fours and was trying to hold the road saying he was being sucked off into the skies from the earth and it, I had never seen anybody in that kind of metaphysical change before and it scared me an awful lot, I think that. . . .  and then of course he went into hospital.’
On a VH1 Legend documentary narrated by Eddie Izzard and broadcast in America in 1998 David Bowie talks about Terry saying ‘‘I think that Terry probably gave me the greatest education, serviceable education I could ever have had. I mean he just introduced me to the outside things. The first real major event for me was when he passed Jack Keruoac’s ‘On the Road’ on to me which really changed my life, and he also introduced me to people like John Coltrane which is way above my head, but I saw the magic, I caught the enthusiasm for it because of his enthusiasm. I wanted to be kind of like him.’

Entertainment was in the family. Terry and David Bowie’s grandmother read, wrote, and recited poetry, and her family would entertain themselves by singing and playing musical instruments at home. Their mother sang around the house and David Bowie when interviewed by Michael Parkinson remembers his mother as having a fine voice. David Bowie’s father was an entertainment’s officer for Dr Barnardos, 
    In his biography Ken Pitt says that, in the mid sixties Terry was still David Bowie’s hero, but that he tried to direct him away from Terry’s influence dismissing the Beat writers as ‘juvenilia’. He encouraged David Bowie to read Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide. The Beat writers were called a lot worse in their time but now are remembered with respect by literary critics. But looking at the list of 100 ‘must read’ books that David Bowie recommends that was released to coincide with the Ontario gallery’s David Bowie is. 
His choice of authors included the then new American Beat writers as well as the English angry young men that were popular at the time. I noticed that it includes books by Albert Camus and Christopher Isherwood, both writers that Terry told me he had read, in fact Terry specifically mentioned Mr Norris Changes Train, the same Chistopher Isherwood book that is in the Bowie list and he had read Camus and was struck by the plight of Mersault in The Outsider. Terry’s interest in literature took also in the more mainstream authors such as Graham Greene 
Again when interviewed by Michael Parkinson, David Bowie said he had read  books by some of the the ‘Angry Young Men’ , Keith Waterhouse, John Braine, and Colin Wilson, as a teenager, and  books by these authors are also on the list. David Bowie went onto say that these books helped to inspire his first songs. It is likely that these books were also passed onto him by Terry. So Terry may have been more influential in his brother’s choice of literature, as a teenager than was previously thought. 
Michael Kidd, the artist, who in the early seventies worked for Decca Records designing record covers, was also a patient at Cane Hill and knew Terry. He recalled that Terry was a drinking man who was always talking about authors. Trevor Chamberlain, another patient had befriended Terry while he was on Blake ward. Trevor suffered from religious mania and would interject the conversation with phrases like 'If our father will allow' and 'get behind thee Satan'. Despite being a voice hearing schizophrenic Trevor told me that he had found the time to look after Terry when the nurses would not, perhaps because of Terry's exaggerated reputation for violence. Trevor said that Terry was well read and that he and Terry would throw the names of authors at each other. I told Trevor that Terry had mentioned Albert Camus, Christopher Isherwood and Graham Greene in conversation, Trevor added Ernest Hemingway to the list of authors Terry admired. In Steven Burrows autobiography Terry says ‘You see, I was always reading when I was younger, I always had a book in my hand. I had a good schooling, not exactly a classical education, but good enough‘.

Rock music and the art world continue to interact, as rock musicians are increasingly seen as artists rather than artistes. Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and David Bowie have each in their own way brought literature to rock music, But the influence the mentally ill have had on the  on the arts continues to go unrecognized  Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch, the fathers of Expressionism, spent time in asylums. The founder of Surrealism, Andre Breton was inspired, along with Max Ernst by the artwork of schizophrenics in the Prinzhorn collection. Andre Breton also spent time with  Leona P. and wrote about her in his book Nadja before she was committed to an asylum. Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko suffered from mental disturbance. I’m not saying that Terry was a phantom of the opera figure responsible for David Bowie’s talent, but he was a formative influence and David Bowie’s first role model. There is no memorial plaque, remembrance marker or rose bush in the crematorium garden where these things are usually placed.

                                                                   David Beales